Anagrams

The prescribed penalty for this offence involved
dunking the convicted offender in water in an instrument called the
"cucking
stool". The cucking stool, according to Blackstone, eventually
became known as a ducking stool by folk
etymology.

Other writers disagree with Blackstone's
assertion equating the two sorts of punishment seat. The Domesday
Book notes the use of a cucking stool at Chester, a seat
also known as cathedra stercoris, a "dung chair", whose punishment
apparently involved exposing the sitter's buttocks to onlookers.
This seat served to punish not only scolds, but also brewers and bakers who sold bad ale or bread, whereas the ducking stool
dunked its victim into the water. Francois
Maximilian Misson, a French traveller and writer, recorded the
method used in England in the early 1700s:

The ducking stool, rather than being fixed in
position by the river or pond, could be mounted on wheels to allow
the convicted woman to be paraded through the streets before
punishment was carried out. Another method of ducking was to use
the tumbrel, which consisted of a chair on two wheels with two long
shafts fixed to the axles. This would be pushed into the ducking
pond and the shafts would be released, tipping the chair up
backwards and ducking the occupant.

A scold's
bridle, known in Scotland as a brank, consists of a locking
metal mask or head cage that
contains a tab that fits in the mouth to inhibit talking. Some have
claimed that convicted common scolds had to wear such a device as a
preventive or punitive measure. Legal sources do not mention them
in the context of the punishment of common scolds, but there are
anecdotal reports of their historical use as a public punishment.
In the United States, scolds or those convicted of similar offenses
could be sentenced to stand with their tongue in cleft stick, a
more primitive but easier to construct version of the scold's
bridle, but the ducking stool also made the trip across the
Atlantic. The Anecdotes also suggest penological ineffectiveness as
grounds for the stool's disuse; the text relates the 1681 case of a
Mrs. Finch, who according to this account had received three
convictions and dunkings as a common scold. On her fourth
conviction, the King's Bench
declined to dunk her again, and instead ordered her to pay a
fine of three marks, and
ordered her imprisoned until payment took place. The Percy
miscellany also quotes a pastoral poem by John Gay
(1685–1732), who wrote that:

While these literary sources do not prove that
the punishment still took place they do provide evidence that it
had not been forgotten.

In The Queen v. Foxby, 6 Mod. 11 (1704), counsel
for the accused stated that he knew of no law for the dunking of
scolds. Lord Chief Justice John
Holt of the Queen's Bench apparently pronounced this error, for
he announced that it was "better ducking in a Trinity,
than a Michaelmasterm",
i.e. better carried out in summer than in winter. The tenor of
Holt's remarks however suggests that he found the punishment an
antiquarian curiosity and something of a joke. The last recorded
uses of the stool for ducking involve a Mrs. Ganble at Plymouth (1808)
and Jenny Pipes, a notorious scold from Leominster
(1809). In 1817 Sarah Leeke, also from Leominster was
sentenced to be ducked but the water in the pond was so low that
the authorities merely wheeled the her round the town in the chair.
In 1972, a prosecution for being a common scold was brought in the
case of State v. Palendrano in which the defendant was charged in
relation to a disturbance. The
New Jersey Superior Court ruled the law was void because of its
vagueness.

Current status of the law

In England
and Wales, the only part of the United
Kingdom where the law had any effect, no prosecutions of common
scolds have occurred for a considerable period. Counsel in Sykes v.
Director of Public Prosecutions [1962] AC 528 described the offence
as "obsolete", and section 13(1)(a) of the Criminal
Law Act 1967 eventually abolished it.